Your Blues is Destroyer’s vainglorious retreat from the American rock’n roll tradition, in the wake of their bloated and oft-maligned (and oft-praised) magnum opus, This Night, which quietly assaulted the bankrupt college rock arena of 2002

Bound to be misread as a return to the precision and economy of hooks found and praised on Destroyer’s breakthrough album, 2001’s Streethawk: A Seduction, Your Blues is more an exercise in old-word excess, exploring what Destroyer mastermind Daniel Bejar dubs “European Blues”. This High Modernist aesthetic feasts off a “between the wars” melancholia, brushed on in the past by avant-gardist crooners (Scott Walker), scholastic-rockers (John Cale) and insane drunk actors (Richard Harris) alike. Destroyer’s take on this fucked tradition finds them conjuring up a version of revisionist nostalgia, unapologetically jumping the gun on a 20th Century Revival movement…Other things brought to mind – the evacuation of a mid-sized European capital; out of work Shakespearean extras (hanging out at the bar); lawyers screwed baecause they backed the wrong revolution; odes to bad statues; and a couple other themes that completely sidestep the dead-in-the-water rock’n roll underground pulsing through the AmerIndie salons of today….

It is doubtful that Your Blues is a ‘pop’ record, though at times it might appear to cash in on what the 80’s revival should’ve been all about: the perverse compositional traits found in The Blue Nile, David Sylvian stripped of his Zen jazz, some of Thomas Dolby’s more hilarious production work with Prefab Sprout, the aforementioned Scott Walker’s Climate Of Hunter, and other ill-formed children of the MIDI word…Disregarding ‘post-punk’, cause that would entail acknowledging ‘punk’ in the first place…Instead, Your Blues is a balancing act between the Adult, the Contemporary, and the Disastrous.

Your Blues is a stunning collection of songs and craftsmanship. Teaming with the production duo JC/DC, who he worked with on his first three records (City Of Daughters, Thief, Streethawk: A Seduction), Bejar has recorded some of his most intriguing and challenging songs to date. And that’s saying something considering that he is already considered one of the consummate songwriters of his generation, both on his own and as a contributor to the widly successful and acclaimed New Pornographers. A master of both the sublime and the absurd, with Your Blues, Destroyer continues to add to its already impressive pedigree as one of the most intruiging acts in music today.